Related Stories

On the one hand, White House officials convened a border law enforcement forum to counter claims that Mexican drug cartels have turned the U.S.-Mexico border into a war zone. On the other, federal agents recently dismantled a cartel network, with San Antonio connections, used to funnel drug money into Mexico.

What are we to believe? Is the border area in the cross hairs of a cartel war gone amok?

The fact that drug smugglers move their profits through San Antonio is neither new nor astonishing. Cross-border money siphoning has been around since the establishment of the border. It follows that it isn't astonishing that the funnel was stopped.

Border violence has also been around for that long. The moment you set up a border and establish laws about what can and cannot come across, there will be people willing to profit from breaking the law. That willingness entails violence.

The matter of concern, though, is the upsurge in cartel violence in Mexico (40,000 murders so far) and whether that surge has crossed into U.S. territory. One of the officials at the White House forum was Hidalgo County Sheriff Lupe Treviño. Last October, a shootout that began among rival drug smugglers in Mexico ended in his jurisdiction — one of his deputies, Hugo Rodriguez, was wounded. But Treviño maintains that cross-border violence is not an issue. He was quoted in the Express-News as saying “The border is not in chaos. We are not at ‘ground zero.'”

Granted, “ground zero” is not at the border. But the issue is not the chaos; the issue is the spillage. And there are rural areas along the border where law enforcement is scarce and where ranchers fear the cartel violence — many have been threatened and in one instance in New Mexico a rancher was slain.

But this is also a given: the opportunity for illicit profit stretches along the entire border, so if the cops get tough in the cities, the robbers will move to the rural areas. Is it a war zone? We'd have to leave that to the experts.

And so you have dueling statements and round-table forums.

It's no coincidence that the opposing views in this issue stand on opposite sides of the political divide. Republicans are sounding the alarm; Democrats are defending against the claim as they say they're defending the border. This isn't new either. As long as there's been a two-party political system in our country there have been claims and counter claims.

Yet in the time that it's taken Mexico to amass 40,000 killings, the rate of violence in U.S. cities and counties along the border has diminished. This doesn't diminish the threat to ranchers who feel accosted by cartel thugs. But it does highlight the fact that in order to pay attention to the problem at the border, we need to stop creating a war zone in our politics. Political chaos will do nothing to stop violence, real or not.